Burning bush?

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimedis a classic of undercover reportage. She worked as a waitress, hotel maid, house-cleaner and Wal-Mart salesperson living in the cheapest lodgings to discover “all the tenacity, anxiety and surprising generosity of low-wage America”.

Then, the self-proclaimed atheist — who trained as a scientist — turned her gimlet eye on the mystery of humanity’s attraction to violence, which resulted in Blood Rites. In Bright-Sided, she went on to skewer America’s penchant for positive thinking. Now she has written Living with a Wild God, which is arguably her most surprising book.

The author, who is in her 70s, casts her eye back on her teenage journal to make a disturbing discovery: during a skiing trip, after being sleep- and food-deprived, she’d suffered a blazing epiphany; an on-rush of mystical visions where “something poured into me and I poured into it”. Save for her journal entry, she wilfully buried the experience deep into her unconscious; never spoke or wrote about it and clung on to a rational, thoroughly atheist and sceptical mode of mind.

With benefit of hindsight, however, she isn’t so sure at all about her “furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once”! So did she or not miss out on prophethood? Couldn’t a simpler explanation, low blood sugar, sleep deprivation, account for her visions? These do veer closer to clinical psychosis than to mystical ESP! Alas, in opting for God, however tentatively, she joins a long line of atheists who allegedly suffered pangs of conversion at the end.